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Class questions/comments 01/11 One question I have about this section of the reading Language and the Speaker is how many possible prefixes and suffixes can be added to a word and what is the longest word made up of different morphemes. Another thing I thought about after reading about compound words was some words like "every day” and "at least.” These are words that growing up I always thought was one word but learned later that they are two. I wonder why these words (or words with a similar style) cannot be made a compound word. It is also interesting to know that languages come from each other so I’m sure a person who speaks many languages has a much larger vocabulary than those who speak only one. Attamante, Kelsey M. I think that the borrowing of words to be used in different languages can be very beneficial for people who are learning different languages (learning one that presumably borrows words from a language that the person already knows.) I have studied French and because so many English words are borrowed from French, it made it significantly easier to learn. Similarly, with Japanese, as Japan has probably borrowed words from many different languages (considering the Japanese word for bread, pan, is pronounced very closely to the French word, pain). Another note on the borrowing of words, specifically in Japanese as mentioned, I have noticed first hand that it has become somewhat popular to borrow English words for things that already exist in Japanese. I have mostly noticed it with younger people as they might tend to think that English/Western culture is somehow more desirable. A more general example that is easier to notice is the notorious use of English on clothing items that make no sense to a native English speaker. Atwood, Michelle M. I found this reading to be interesting because it clearly shows the difference between acronyms and initialisms. I thought all things like NASA, AIDS, NAFTA were all acronyms; but that is not the case. Also it taught me that common words that we use today come from acronyms like radar. I would have never known that symbolized something if I did not read this article. The idea of clipping interested me as well, because I see how it is used in everyday life. Instead of Schedule, some people say “sched”; people want to shorten things to make conversation more fluid. Borrowing words is also something I see as well, since the modern English language comes from French, Latin, German, etc. Comparing idioms to shibboleths was also interesting, as I have seen on TV shows where they try to make comedy of foreigners saying idioms incorrectly. Bass, Jefferson R. It seems important if one wants to become totally fluent in another language, to understand the history of that language as well as its interactions with their native language. Understanding how the parts of words come together in a language someone is learning would help with remembering other words, since they understand the structure of what a word should look like. In my experience with Spanish language classes, the focus is more on the structure and order of the sentence to make it grammatical. For example, learning that the word “no” at the beginning of the sentence indicates a negative in the latter part of the sentence. Understanding the words as they’re broken down can keep a non-native English speaker from misusing affixes or leaving them off entirely. Baxley, Morgan N. Chapter 3 In chapter three there is a section about borrowing words from other languages. I was at the dentist today and my dentist and I were talking about my languages and the technician said to say “hello” in all of the languages I know. I explained to her that “Namaste” is the same for Hindi and Mahrati, then said “hola,” “hallo,” then “hello. She found it interesting that the German word for “hello” is “hallo.” While I was reading this made me think of the connection in borrowing words from other languages and changing them or keeping them the same. German words like uber and doppelgänger are used in the English language all the time. Chapter 4 Chapter four discussed sentence order which is another thought provoking topic for me because of the different sentence structures in all different languages. For example, in English the sentence “I went to school” is written in the patter: noun, verb, adverb, noun. In German however, the sentence is “Ich bin zur Schule gegangen” which is in the pattern: noun, adverb, adverb, noun, verb. For us native English speakers, the German sentence seems jumbled and out of order, but of course the idea is a two-way street. Bhonsle, Meera R. LATE One of the most interesting things I found out about the Davies and Dubinsky reading was the idea of clipping. I like this idea the most because it relates most to my life, I use clipping almost everyday. I also like the idea of blending because when you combine all of these things you can get so many new words. One question I had after the reading was who comes up with the new words and who decides whether they are words. I know if it is in the dictionary it is a word but some words are not in the dictionary and most people understand what the word is. Blakeney, Oliver P. Cahn, Natalie R. Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning in a language There are different types, there are bound and free morphemes. There is a distinct way to tell whether or not an element is a morpheme, they have to look like one and also have a clear meaning/use. Allomorphs are another type and are a group of related sounds that are used in the same way. Borrowing other words to form a new word could be the way we use slang? Word order can be different in each language, for example Spanish. Also grammatically, the way words are said or form can be dependent of the gender of a person, example: Spanish. Castaneda, Alison A. When reading through chapter 4, a couple of questions arose. The first is why is it that only Romantic languages have grammatical gender agreement? Is it because of the context of the writing? Or is that just how the language was developed? Also, what makes a language “Romantic?” Anything could be romantic if it’s worded correctly, so why are there certain Romance languages? Another question that came up was why ‘shorty or shawty’ deemed to be of African American colloquialism? And why is it saying that when a white person does it, that’s when it is seen as being affected and insincere? Just because it’s coming from a white person’s mouth doesn’t mean that it is only seen as insincere when they say it. Clark, Morgan L. LATE In today’s readings, I found out how uninformed I was about the various terms concerning language. I thought I knew the meanings of many of the terms, because I had an English minor and worked with English in professional products for almost 20 years in the army; however, that was not the case. The definition of acronym was the biggest shock for me. Before this class while serving in the army, I would have said we have acronyms for everything: Intelligence, Reconnaissance, and Surveillance is called ISR. The word acronym in the army is what linguists call initialisms. If I was to correct someone in the army on their misuse of the word acronym, my superiors would have looked at me like I was crazy, which leads me to my next point. I was an English minor, and I wrote well. Armed with The Elements of Style, I was very familiar with grammar usage. I would constantly have superiors tell my grammar was wrong; I knew that was not the case and would refer them to the accepted rule in the reference. My point for bringing this up and my question for the class is: What use is using linguists’s terms if your co-workers do not know or care to know the correct meanings? What are the practical applications for this knowledge? Does the etymology of a word help us in anyway, except for giving us a greater understanding of its meaning or sparking our curiosity about history? Next, I loved the example of using the Lord’s prayer to illustrate language change over thousands of years. The reason being is there is a great debate over the name of God and what entails blasphemy. Throughout your examples of the Lord’s prayer you can see (J) being predicated by (I), and I being predicated by (Y). According to certain faiths, the Institute of Divine Metaphysical Research in particular, Jesus could not have been the messiah’s name because the letter J was not in the alphabet at the time the messiah was alive, so how could it be blasphemy to say Jesus Christ? Wars have been fought, and people have been killed because of saying this words in anger. I really appreciated seeing the example used in the slides. There are times I feel there is so much animosity over the origins of things because no one can look back far enough to get the facts; if we could, I suspect all of us would be wrong. Collins, Matthew With all the combinations of morphemes that can be connected, learning English must be difficult for foreigners. I feel like it would be very helpful to learn the prefixes and suffixes when learning English. In English classes, is there a section on how to combine morphemes? Since countries like France try to limit the number of borrowed words, how do they find new words to describe completely new technology? I know that they can combine previous words to form new words to describe this new technology, but is that enough? Are there enough morphemes to describe all new actions and technology created during hundreds of years? Feigh, Madison H. It is interesting to me how broad and almost undefinable the word "language" actually is. As the reading says, language must include many accents and dialect continuums. But what can really be defined as a language? There are so many factors that one must acknowledge when defining language besides the linguistic part, including politics, social factors, and even simple geography. Though if two people from opposite ends of one country cannot understand each other, can one say the are speaking the same language? Also I did not really understand the saying of "Language is a dialect with an army and a navy." Are they trying to say the only way to change or share language is through political force? Gabriele, Isabella R. Looking at the blending and clipping of English words to form shorter (sometimes more precise) words, one can see how English can be difficult to master. A more traditional approach to English, lexically, shows most words having one specific meaning. This also leads to lexical borrowing between Japanese and English and French, for example. Why does Japanese borrow the English word “milk”(as miruku) instead of keeping its traditional Japanese word “gyuunyuu”? This can also be asked for the English borrowing “croissant” from the French, instead of being content with “crescent roll”. Both base languages(Japanese and English) had their own words for the respective articles, yet they borrowed words from another language to, in turn, create a new word for an already existing word. Does the borrowing of these words show the cultures that borrow them are seeking exoticism through language? Do they find their own language not satisfying? Why does the whole coffee industry revolve around Italian words? We get coffee from all over the world and every country has a different way of brewing it. Why is the Italian language the spearhead for this industry? Gawinski, Kyle T. In terms of borrowing words, I recall learning the word “spoon” in Spanish while I was in high school. In Spanish, spoon is translated to cuchara but interestingly enough, in my native language (Tagalog) we say it the same way just spelled differently. In Tagalog, it is spelled like kutsara. I was reminded of this when I read the section about how when Semitic languages borrow English words, they only keep the consonants. The fact that the consonants changed in my example got me to do some digging on why this was so. I found that while the Spanish alphabet had “ch,” the Filipino alphabet did not. Gonzales, Paula B. Instead of viewing words as just words, it is important to see them as building blocks. Instead of just writing, it is almost a science of putting the right formula together. This is an interesting perspective to take while going through the reading. This ideal directly relates to morphemes. These are important because with a small variation or part added to a word, it can have an entirely different meaning. But, the catch is, one part added correlating with a meaning in one word is not always the same as a part added to another word (with the possible same meaning). This makes it easy to understand why English is one of the hardest languages to learn, and the question arises: how do foreigners learn and interpret morphemes? Hobbs, Brecken Chapter 3 talks about how people mainly equate language with words. A language is made up of more than just words. Not much thought is given to the actual sounds that these words make. The sound itself may not have an actual meaning, however it is what the word is made up of. Grammatical structure is also not given much thought when it comes to language. Morpheme is a term used to describe the smallest unit of meaning within a language. I think a very important question how can someone's spoken language be so simple but so complex at the same time? Chapter 4 examines how words are put together to form utterances or sentences. How words are put together to form sentences can vary from language to language. Sometimes it can create a lot of ambiguity and confusion when trying to communicate with someone who speaks a different language. Often times words or phrases can be taken out of context if two people don't have a full understanding of one another's language. Is it possible to be able to put a group of words together so that the message that is trying to be conveyed is understandable no matter what language it's spoken in? Hunter, Khadijah J. Davies & Dubinsky. Chapter 3, pp. 21-34. When looking at the break down of certain words in English, it appears as if some of the rules of the language are made up as they happen. English itself does not appear to be as logical as other languages when it comes to structures of some of it's words. For example, in Spanish, there is a clear distinction between plural and singular words, an example being "el libro" versus "los libros." The definite articles (el, los) change to show there is a difference between the singular and plural tenses, along with the addition of the "s" to the noun. In English, the addition of the "s" is dependent on context about whether or not it changed the word to be plural. Using the example from the reading, the words "dogs" and "lens" both have the "s," but "len" is not a word in the English language, which means it is a noun in the singular tense. I can imagine this would be very difficult for someone trying to learn English who is unfamiliar with very particular contexts, considering the rules morpheme usage depend entirely on context. Davies & Dubinsky. Chapter 4, pp. 35-50. The concept of a word having a gender, is in itself a very confusing topic for many speakers of the non-romance languages. The use of certain objects or items having genders seems to be unnecessarily used, for example, some inanimate objects have no physical genders in order to identify them and must have an artificially created gender in which to be referred to when spoken about. Another example of the gender agreement being potentially confusing is in German, where young females: “Mädchen”, are referred to in the gender neutral case. This group of people is obviously female, and when they get older they are referred to in the feminine case, however simply due to their current ages, they are referred to with a different gender when spoken about. Personally, when I was attempting to learn German, this was incredibly confusing as I kept referring to a “Mädchen” with the improper gender and creating unnecessary confusion, but if they were only referred to in the same manner as their physical gender, this miscommunication could have been easily avoided. Kibler, Jessica L. A question that I've always asked (or wanted to ask) is "How are new words created?" And chapter 3 is the best answer I've found yet. The example of the word "overgeneralizations" really helped me visualize the creation of words and how each individual affix added (such as the "s") can change the meaning of the word. I find the method of compounding especially interesting--mainly how, once again, the meaning changes when the words are separated; i.e. "blackbird." But the one question I have about this topic is: how do linguists decide what becomes a new word and what doesn't? Is it said repeatedly by its culture and assimilated into every day vocabulary? Or is it more of a complex process? Kilgore, Linda K. Chapter 3 comments: When reading this chapter, the section that talks about how native English speakers blend words, made me notice how many words we put together that don’t always apply to the word itself. They used the word ‘blackbird’ for example and that not all black birds are called ‘blackbirds’. It made me question, how do non-native English speakers understand that? I feel that if I was not a native English speaker, trying to learn English and all the unwritten rules we have would seem almost impossible. Do other languages have as many or any rules that are related to the ones English has? Chapter 4 comments: When looking at chapter 4, and reading the section about idioms, it made me think all the expressions we use and would never take literally and how many languages and cultures also have commonly used idioms. But do people ever use the same expression or idiom in their native language? Or does it just depend on the expression? When people come into a certain social group or culture, they try to fit in by using the same vernacular as the group, which is sometimes seem as disrespectful. Personally I wouldn’t find it disrespectful but more respectful because it shows that people are trying something new and trying to learn new things. Kostuchenko, Hannah F. SHORT The first thing that I noticed in this reading was about compounding. In English, words like highchair and high chair do not mean the same thing. Are there any instances where they do mean the same thing or can mean a similar thing? I also found it very interesting how the same ending -man gave milkman and snowman entirely different meanings from their root words. Lastly, I was very confused and intrigued when I saw that Chinese people cannot signal word order in text. May, Wesley H. LATE The reading for this lecture enlightened me to the parts of words themselves, an idea that is not explored in English classes. Like the opening paragraph of chapter 3, I also believed that words were the smallest units of the language and that prefixes, suffixes, and the like were largely irrelevant to the language as a whole, beyond changing meanings of words. Now that I have learned about the morphemes of a language, I see that the word itself, while it carries meaning, is nothing but the sum of sounds. While this class focuses on English of course, the reading caused me to reflect on my Chinese class and why it is so difficult for me to be able to listen and to read the language and understand whilst my speaking skills are much better, relatively speaking: if morphemes are simply a collection of sounds, then it is much easier to be able to recognize and identify those sounds when speaking if the written word is the same sum of those sounds. Phonetic alphabets give guides to the pronunciation of words, making them easier to read and speak, whilst the character system of Chinese gives clues to the meaning of words, but not to pronunciation, almost the opposite of English. The question I have is how are these morphemes represented and analyzed in languages that do not have an alphabet, but rely on a character system to write? McAllister, Sarah B. The variation in word creative is fascinating. What most interesting is how people borrow word from another community and modify to make it their own. As mention in the reading, Japan is famous with borrowing word from English and change the pronunciation so they can say it easier in their language. It is not a complete copy from word to word. Under which circumstances a country would heavily borrowing words from foreign language to express and describe their idea? Why does organization such as OQLF against the act of borrowing word from another country? Are they afraid that they will lose their culture inherited? What is the big disadvantages? The word order affects each language differently. Countries such as Japan can change the word other and pretty much keep the same meaning of the sentence as their verb is always at the end. Unlike Japanese, English is limited in changing word other and can confuse reader if wrongly worded. Nguyen, Hieu C. Davies & Dubinsky. Chapter 3, pp. 21-34 This section of the article discusses words and their structures. Prior to reading this article I was unaware of the technicalities involved in word structure. I was introduced to new terms such as the different types of morphemes and how they can be used. I find it interesting how homonyms, or words that sound the same are truly two different words. Their word structures are completely different and intended to mean different things although they look and sound the same. There are many other “word building” terms such as clipping, blending, and initialisms. I also found it interesting how much of the English we use came from foreign languages. Davies & Dubinsky. Chapter 4, pp. 35-50 The next chapter talks about how we use grammar and organize words into sentences and phrases. Some of the things required to properly structure a sentence are grammatical case, word order, and verb conjugations. All of things help indicate who the subject is and what he, she, they, or it are doing. One exception to these sentence structure rules are idioms. According to the article idioms are “fixed in meaning in form”. In order for them to hold true to the meaning the order and content has to stay the same. For example the idiom “kick the bucket” typically means to die. If you were to specify and say “kick the lime green beach bucket” it no longer means to die, it means to literally kick the bucket described. Odom, Jalisa I enjoyed reading about morphemes and how they construct and deconstruct language. It made me rethink many words I say, as well as think about my second language. English has many morphemes, but so does Korean (my second language). In Korean, the prefix hak(학) is used to denote something school related. Hakkyo(학교) = school, haksaeng(학생) = student. However, it can also have a similar meaning when used as a suffix, for example: kyeongjehak(경제학) means economics major, with the hak denoting major. When incorporating these morphemes into language learning, it becomes formulaic and much easier to handle. Borrowing words from another language is an interesting point to me as well. As an English speaking, we have many borrowed words from Latin languages, which we welcome freely. However, in some communities, there is resistance. Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are all mutually intelligible, however in Croatia they actively resist loan words into the language, whereas in Serbia they welcome them. LATE Patterson, Erik N. As a newcomer to the subject of Linguistics, it is rather comforting to be able to understand pieces of something as fluid and complex as language through comparisons to simple chemical equations and math problems. Furthermore, it is interesting to me that so much of language (or at least the English language) is formed out of convenience and laziness. The most extreme case being the process of shortening a phrase from multiple separate words such as “National Aeronautic and Space Administration” to a series of initials like “NASA”, which was likely first pronounced “en a ess a”, to an EVEN shorter and lazier “næsə”. This phenomenon is likely why certain words like the examples in the text “LASER” and “RADAR” are often not even written commonly with all capital letters in traditional acronym format but rather are written like “laser” and “radar”. I personally had forgotten that these two words were acronyms to begin with. Some acronyms that are also interesting to me that recently seem to have developed in a unique way are “POTUS” and “FLOTUS” (standing, respectfully, for President and First Lady of the United States). These acronyms seem to have followed the path from “President”, to written acronym “POTUS”, to the spoken, soundedout acronym “POH-TUHS” we hear from newscasters and journalists alike. These interesting developments of “new words” make me curious as to whether there will be clipping and blending of acronyms in the near future of the English language. Potter, Ansley D. LATE I found a few things in this reading to be very interesting. I did not realize how uninformed I was with the amount of change the English language has gone through. Within just the last few hundred years, my native language was almost unreadable to me. Looking over this reading, even 400-500 years ago, words were spelled completed different. Up to 700 years ago, different vows were used in words with completely different pronunciations. It is almost bizarre to me how much I didn’t know that each language evolves almost completely. Today, we use shorter words that aren’t classified as actual words, that probably in 30 or 40 years will be considered actual words. Price, Alexander N. Rhoney, Kevin R. Realizing that when native English speakers pronounce words like "passed" as "past," it makes me wonder if non-native English speakers are confused because there is potential for them to associate the term 'past' with a sentence that actually is referring to literally passing something. Tone is very important when understanding a sentence in its entirety. I find that when I speak another language, I lose the usual tone I have when I speak English; I pause more and forget to place emphasis on certain words like I do so naturally with English. In a person's native language they tend to place emphasis and let their voice rise and fall when carrying on a conversation; I believe tone helps with recognizing if a word is compound or not. In regard to compound words, writing and saying "high school" has always given me trouble. Most people, myself included, pronounce it as if it were one compounded word, "highschool," when we should be placing equal emphasis on 'high' 'school.' Until now I have never taken into consideration how things like AIDS, FBI and USA are read and pronounced. Growing up I have always thought of AIDS as an actual entity with that name when in reality it is an acronym that entails what the disease is. I've learned that word order is very important in the Arabic language. It differs from English and when English students try to create a sentence in Arabic their vocabulary may be correct but the order of words usually follows what they are used to in English and, therefore, does not make sense to a native Arabic speaker. Rudisell, Laura H. I find it interesting that the first thing most people think of when they hear language is words, the first thing that pops into my mind is different cultures and how different countries speak different languages. With prefixes and suffixes being used to make new words, this is creating new words everyday. I’m sure I have misused prefixes and suffixes to create my own new words. It makes you wonder how many new words have been made as a result of this? Clipping and bending is being misused every day across the world, which is resulting in many new words being made that may not even make sense. Also, with borrowing words from other languages most likely results in misuse and misinterpretation of words. It really makes you think about how many of the words and phrases we use today are actually “real” words, or was the meaning lost in translation? Sharifi, Layla J. It is very interesting how certain words are formed together. I've always knew certain words we use, were borrowed from other countries but now I know how certain words and acronyms have come about. Every English class I have been in, I have never heard of clipping and bending. That was very interesting section in the reading that brought to my realization of why the words like biology and mathematics derived from just suffix compounding. In the chapter 4 reading, sentencing structure is highly dependent in English. Chinese civilians have a huge oriented way of using their sentence structures and so do other languages. I really see the why it is hard to learn/study a different language because not everyone’s sentencing guidelines are the same. Shell, De-Juan T. The chapter about morphemes made me realize why I was required to learn "stems" in middle school: to more accurately make a guess to what an unfamliar word meant. When the author discussed clipping, he stated that we don't have a geo for geography or geology. Actually we do! National Geographic has its own channel now called "Nat Geo" so I think we're really close to having (if not already) geo for geography as we have bio for biology. The borrowing part made me think of bilinguals who, when they forget a word in the language they're speaking, will use a word from the other language they know, making them speak two languages at the same time. For example, someone who uses spanish words in their english when they forget the english word. Now they are speaking what many call "Spanglish"-a word that could be used as example for blending. Does every language have an official learned authority who tries to make rules and preserve the language? Stuyck, Renee A lot of times when I hear or see words I automatically know the meaning of the word and don’t think of the complex meaning that they have, such as the word overgeneralizations. The word is made up of multiple affixations that have their own meanings. With the different morphemes it could get confusing but they make sense when you think of them individually. Words can still be made from words that already exist and that we use everyday just by combining them and giving them knew meaning. It is also interesting how different areas use different clips of words such as the word telephone, we call it the phone whereas the british call it the tele. Also, why do some words get clipped where some similar do not? Toney, Grace-Elizabeth Tovar, Alex I never realized till now how much a native language, in which you express your thoughts and emotions, becomes a part of you. Languages which employ different grammatical structures than your own language must be very difficult to learn. My husband and his sister spent two of their teen-age years in Japan when their father was stationed there. Although at first they were not happy about the move, they grew to love Japan, and became enthusiastic about the language and culture. Both became proficient in spoken Japanese; John's sister is fluent. I suppose they were able to learn quickly because they were relatively young, and were fully immersed in the language. I think their love of the country and culture, their desire to be part of it, also gave them the impetus to learn Japanese. Yaffe, Carol I find it amazing that we can make so many words by making small modifications to one word. Word order is seemingly crucial for English or for any language of that matter. One thing I noticed when I’m studying Korean and Japanese is that they put the verb, subject, and noun or object switched around making the order: subject noun/object verb. People I’ve spoken to about English idioms that are not fluent in the language always take them too seriously and are often confused when we say them without an explanation. Also I wonder why certain places develop different words for the same thing, is it just a regional thing? Would all words fit into a morpheme category? For example, are all nouns considered free context morphemes? Yates, Asia N. Chapter 3 Comments: My initial question for this reading is how other languages and cultures describe their "morphemes", "allomorphs", and compounds. We have obviously been raised on how words form together so it now comes naturally to us, but, how does it work in other parts of the world? The last reading discussed how simple explanations in English are not quite as simple in (as exampled) German. This is where I am curious to how these terms are traded in such languages. Finally, I have a comment on the French Academy. If college students are smart enough to know that language is changing then why are these people attempting to stop it? Do they not realize that their tyrannical (and frankly almost dystopian) mindset will be futile? Chapter 4 Comments: Every student’s most common dread in high school was when it was time to read stories in old english. This was because of how difficult it was to understand the syntax of each sentence written in old/middle english. We no longer speak or write in this way, in fact, we have linguistic rules that go directly against that way of writing. Usually, as I have noticed, when languages change it is due to rising technological or medical terms and phrases; this obviously happened between the time of old english and now- dubbing our new common words and terms- however, nothing new happened in order for us to change the syntax. How did linguists suddenly say that way of writing is improper? Zeller, Katherine M.